This invention relates generally to social networking systems, and more specifically to managing contact information associated with social networking system users.
Social network systems, or social utilities that track and enable online connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become increasingly prevalent. In particular, social networking systems allow their users to associate themselves with other users to create a web of connections among the social networking system users. For example, social networking system users may establish connections with each other based on one or more common attributes in user profiles, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, musical preferences, interests, online games, or other attributes. Social networking system users connected to each other may exchange content with each other.
Some social networking systems also include tools identifying other users with which a user may establish a connection or identifying additional persons for a user to invite to establish an account with the social networking system. Many of these tools allow a social networking system user to import contact information describing the social networking system user's contacts outside of the social networking system. For example, a social networking system user imports an address book or other e-mail contact list. The social networking system compares characteristics of the imported contact list to user profile information maintained for other social networking system users. Social networking system users with user profile information matching a portion of the contact information and not connected to the user are identified to the user for establishing a connection.
However, many social networking system users have incomplete user profile information or out of date user profile information. Additionally, some social networking system users store multiple pieces of information corresponding to different portions of their user profiles, making it difficult to identify profile information matching imported content information. For example, a user profile may include multiple e-mail addresses for a social networking system user, making it difficult to identify a current e-mail address for matching to imported contact information. Hence, conventional social networking systems may fail to identify additional users for connecting to a user based on contact information imported by the user.